Posts Tagged ‘‘Angry White Men’’

Mike put up a piece on his blog today, commenting on the distinction the lamestream media makes between White and Muslim terrorists. He was discussing the coverage of Darren Osborne, the islamophobe who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of worshippers leaving two mosques in London. Osborne had become obsessed with killing Muslims after watching a documentary on the Muslim grooming gangs and radicalised by following various anti-Islamic groups, including the notorious Britain First, on the net.

What drew Mike’s ire was the way Osborne was described as a ‘loner’, in sharp contrast to the various Islamist mass murderers, who were rightly described as terrorists. They were. So is Osborne. He killed and maimed innocent people for a political ideology. And there is no difference in the pattern of his radicalisation from the Islamists. Many of them were self-radicalised, turning to hatred and violence by following the propaganda spewed over the internet by groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. They were described as ‘lone wolves’, which I think is how the Islamists themselves want to promote them and their actions.

But White killers like Osborne aren’t described as what they are – terrorists.

Mike wonders if this was propaganda. And he has a Tweet by Tom London, who also comments on this distinction, and makes the point that to understand these peoples’ action, you need to understand the causes.

Mike and Mr London aren’t the only people, who’ve noticed this peculiar double standard. The American left-wing and progressive news shows – The Young Turks, in particular, – have also commented repeatedly on the way the media in America also makes this distinction. Whites are ‘loners’, Muslims are ‘terrorists’. And Islamist terrorism is taken very seriously. As it should. White racist terrorism should also be treated in the same way. In fact, it deserves more attention and effort to combat it, as there’s actually more of it than Islamist violence. But Trump’s decided to just about close down the parts of the FBI dedicated to monitoring and tracking White supremacist terrorist organisations. Of course, some of this is self-interest for Trump, as he’s received strong backing from White Supremacist groups, most notably the Alt-Right. Which has its own gang of violent, SA-type thugs in the ‘Proud Boys’, who believe that combating the threat to White America means going out and beating up Anti-Fascists.

But there’s a wider, underlying assumption here. It’s that White America and Britain is tolerant and non-racist, and that the threats to British and American society come from outside. From the ‘unassimilable immigrants’ the Daily Mail, Express and the Torygraph talked so much about under Thatcher, and continue to discuss in those terms. And when the Scum declares that we are a tolerant society, attacking a White racist outrage, you have to be amazed at their hypocrisy. This is a paper that never missed a trick to vilify Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Nearly twenty years ago Private Eye ran a piece about the rag’s double standards, pointing out that there had been 19 complaints against the Scum for racism upheld by the Press Complaints Commission, as was.

Now I don’t doubt that most Brits now aren’t racist, although there still is lingering prejudice, particularly towards Muslims. Some of that is the result of the War on Terror and Israeli propaganda – when the word ‘terrorist’ began entered widespread use in the 1960s-70s, it was always in the context of Muslim and Palestinian/Arab terror. It was the deliberate use of language to present Israel as the noble, wronged party, standing against murderous fanatics. Who were, as orientals, terrible others to be feared and hated. And some of it comes from the real fanatics, who organised demonstrations demanding the death of Salman Rushdie and the Pope, waving banner proclaiming that we would soon be visited for our crimes by the jihadis. And some of this is media bias, as the counterdemonstrations organised by far more tolerant, liberal Muslims against the bigots, firebrands and wannabe mass murderers didn’t receive nearly so much coverage.

There are also dangers with accusing White society en masse of racism. Nobody likes to be told they’re racist, and I’m afraid some of the self-proclaimed anti-racist and Black and ethnic minority advocacy groups did go too far in claiming that British racism was endemic and widespread. Some of them really did give the impression that they regarded all White people as racist. And this has provoked a backlash. Way back around 2004 the Spectator ran a piece, ‘Blackened Whites’, attacking anti-racist groups for unfairly smearing the White British majority, and particularly White men. It was the Tories attempt to use the Republicans’ tactic of appealing to ‘angry White men’, who feel threatened and demonised by feminism and the rise of Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Pushing anti-racist campaigning too far, and labelling all Whites, or nearly all Whites racist, risks further alienating ordinary people, who would otherwise be sympathetic. It plays into the hands of the Tories, who would like to present themselves as the nice, anti-racist party, in contrast to all the White proles in the Labour movement. See Owen Jones’ book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, for the way the media deliberately misrepresented an industrial dispute about the use of immigrant workers to see how the Tories and their lapdogs in the press do this.

But there is real racism there. The Tory party was riven in the 1980s with groups declaring their support for ‘racial nationalism’ – the ideology of the National Front and BNP. The Conservative youth organisations were notorious for it, before they were shut down by Norman Fowler and merged into Conservative Future. But these racists haven’t gone away, and neither has the anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s still there in the right-wing press. A little while ago that side of the Tories tended to decamp to UKIP. But now that UKIP’s very definitely on the rocks, they’re all coming back. In the meantime, there’s always Boris Johnson and Toby Young to make horrifically racist pronouncements, although in fairness to Johnson, he did apologise for his comments about ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon grins’.

And so a White racist, who killed and injured innocent people, simply because of their religion, gets called a ‘loner’, but not the terrorist he is.

Last Tuesday, Mike put up a piece commenting on an interview on that day’s Daily Politics of the Tory MP, George Freeman by Jo Cockburn. Cockburn had let Freeman’s comments that the Labour party was ‘nasty and intolerant’, with anti-Semitic and misogynist abuse rife in the party.

This is, of course, a falsehood. The anti-Semitism accusations and the witch-hunt against those accused of it is entirely political, and has zero to do with real anti-Semitism. It’s a campaign by Zionist organisation like the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Poale Zion, which states in its Constitution that it is a Zionist organisation, to defend Israel from criticism and opprobrium over its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Those accused are not just gentiles, but also self-respecting, secular and Torah-observant Jews. The non-Jews they also accuse are similarly very often convinced anti-Fascist activists, and campaigners against racism and anti-Semitism. It’s a tactic used by Zionists across the globe. Norman Finkelstein, one of the leading critics of Israel’s maltreatment of its indigenous Arabs, has described them as ‘a factory for making anti-Semites’. Mike is one of those smeared. So is Jackie Walker, the anti-racist daughter of a Russian Jewish father and a Black American mother. Her parents met on a Civil Rights march. Mike’s article comments on the way a Zionist troll, Emma Pickens, smears her by confusing her with another Jackie Walker. Which he observes is par for the course. The Zionists smear, lie and distort and twist evidence without compunction.

As for the ‘misogyny’, that’s similarly illusory. A group of 30 Labour female MPs accused Momentum of this, writing to Jeremy Corbyn to stop it. They were all entitled Blairites, who were frightened for their seats now that Corbyn moderates were the ascendant, and ready to reverse the decades of Thatcherism that has wrecked this country and impoverished its great people. And the way they decided to do this, was by following Killary’s lead against her left-wing opponent in America, Bernie Sanders. She made up stories about his followers being misogynists, and invented a class of supporters she called ‘Bernie Bros’. There was no misogyny on that part of the Left, and the ‘Bernie Bros’ existed only in her imagination. It’s the same with these ladies and their accusations, but it’s all grist to the mill for Tory and establishment propaganda.

Freeman then went on to excuse Boris Johnson’s comments, made over a decade ago during or after a trip to Africa, about Black Africans. BoJo had written a piece about ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon grins’. BoJo himself has apologised for these comments, but when asked about them, Freeman responded that ‘it was just Boris’. It’s all ‘journalistic language’. Or something like that. It doesn’t wash. Buddy Hell, of Guy Debord’s Cat, stated quite rightly that Johnson would not get away with writing similar material which used anti-Semitic stereotypes against the Jews. Many others on Twitter were also disgusted with BoJo’s racism, and Freeman’s defence of it.

Boorish Johnson’s dated vocabulary brings to mind some of the sputtering of that other right-wing journo, who spent his time abusing and sneering at the left, Auberon Waugh. Waugh once complained in an interview in the 1980s to one of the middle market tabloid Sunday supplements – either for the Mail on Sunday or the Sunday Express – that his daughter had gone to Ethiopia to teach ‘Blackamoors’.

Going further back, it also recalls the racist invective poured out by Enoch Powell in his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. He made comments there about ‘grinning picaninnies’, along with all the racist incidents, which also happened only in his imagination.

I did wonder if Johnson’s anti-Black spleen was the result of extenuating circumstances. Africa is a continent with huge potential and a creative people, beset by terrible problems. Many of its countries are so corrupt that the Financial Times described them once as ‘kleptocracies, which are only considered countries courtesy of the UN’. The various warlords, who have arisen to plunge these nations into civil war are often guilty of the vilest human rights abuse. If you want examples, look up the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, and the horrific abuse they mete out against the children they kidnap as recruits. I think BoJo encountered some of these private armies and their commanders, and that would leave a very bitter impression. Although Whites, who have settled in Uganda have praised ordinary Ugandans for their great national character. These butchers are not representative of Black Africa as a whole.

But I don’t think this washes any more. Neither do I believe that it is just how Boris writes. Most people don’t make those comments, and many Whites would probably feel embarrassed reading them out in front of Blacks, even their Black friends. Several generations of children have been taught to know better. I can remember when I was at junior school, I picked up a few nasty racist terms for Blacks from the other pupils. When I tried them out that evening, I was told very firmly by my mother that these were certainly not ways to talk to, or about, Black people. And that if I did ever use it to one of them, it would get me hit, and quite right too. And I’m sure other people have had similar experiences.

Johnson may have been told this, but he clearly decided to reject it before he wrote the offending article. And I honestly don’t believe he’s the only one. Back in the 1990s a backbench Tory MP was thrown out for using similar racist terms about Blacks. In the 1980s there was a resurgence of ‘racial nationalism’ – the ideology of the NF and BNP – in many parts of the Tory party. And going further back to the various British Fascist groups during the Second World War, the aims of one of them was ‘to purge the Conservative party of Jewish influence.’

Johnson’s image of an accident, gaffe-prone ‘lovable oaf’ – at least, that’s the image he and his supporters want to project – is very carefully crafted. In private his hair is carefully combed, but he messes it before appearing on TV. He is also a very shrewd, calculating, aggressive political manipulator. And those who know him have said that the bonhomie he exudes on programmes like Have I Got News For You is similarly false. In reality he has a vicious temper.

I simply don’t believe that Johnson’s vile comments about Black Africans are simply his way of writing about them. He’s made enough mistakes like that in his career as Foreign Secretary to show that he has no clue about not offending people, but I think this goes much further than that. I think this is how he, and a very large proportion of his party, sincerely feel about Blacks. Though in journalism they have been very careful to dress it up in dated language, in order to camouflage it and present it as a bit more upmarket than the gutter abuse spat out by the avowed Fascists.

And under Johnson there was an undercurrent of real anti-Black racism in the Spectator. Taking their cue from the Republicans’ appeal to ‘angry White men’, one piece in the Speccie began with the remark that there was only one ethnic group not welcome in inner London: White men. A piece in another issue by one of their other hacks told the story about how he had his mobile stolen by a Black man, and how mistaken he was when the thief phoned him to tell him he’d return it, only to do nothing of the kind. It was a scam designed to help the thief prolong the use he had of it before he had to ditch it. The writer of the piece added to this story his experience of giving the Black thief the benefit of the doubt, only to be disappointed. It was a coded piece designed to appeal to White prejudice about Black criminality.

Johnson is a racist, in my opinion, who appeals to the racist elements that still survive in a very racist party. Despite David Cameron’s attempt to purge it of racism and connections to the Far Right. And George Freeman looks very much like one of the racists. Meanwhile, they retail all the Blairite and Zionist lies about anti-Semitism and misogyny in the Labour party, while doing nothing – absolutely nothing – about the real bigots and vicious racists in their own.

In this video from Telesur’s The Empire Files, Abby Martin discusses the repugnant rise on Steve Bannon, the head of Breitbart and pillar of the Alt Right now serving as the chief advisor in Trump’s cabinet. She describes how Bannon began his career as an officer in the US navy. An ardent militarist with a love for war and staunch supporter of Ronald Reagan, Bannon was nevertheless disappointed at not seeing active combat as the conflict he was hoping for with Iran did not materialise. He left the navy to work in the US financial industry for Goldman Sachs, before leaving them to form his own investment house. He got the job with Goldman Sachs after personally meeting the first head. After selling his investment company two years later, he began making right-wing documentary films. These are apocalyptic dystopias of a collapsing America under assault from armies of criminals. But they weren’t successful beyond the restricted circles of the Tea Party. So in 2004 he moved to working for an internet company, IGE, or Internet Gaming Entertainment. This made its money from paying people to mine the Virtual resources in internet game such as World of Warcraft to sell to the games’ players. Bannon managed to convince Goldman Sachs to plough $60 million into this fantasy world. However, IGE was run by some ‘highly problematic’ people. Its founder, Marc Collins-Rector, was wanted for child rape, and eventually all three of the company heads were sued for the abuse of underage boys. Eventually IGE itself collapsed, sued in a class action by games.

A new company, Affinity Media, rose from the remains of IGE. Bannon overthrew the head of this company and replaced him with himself. He then left it a few years later to work for Breitbart.

The film also discusses his abusive second marriage to Mary Louise Bacard, whom he married after she became pregnant. Bannon postponed marrying her until only three days before she gave birth, stating that he wasn’t going to marry her unless the children were normal. Fortunately, amniocentesis scans showed they were. He did not pay much attention to his two newborn daughters and refused to pay child maintenance. Less than a year into the marriage, a domestic argument broke out between Bannon and Bacard, which ended with Bannon becoming violent and trying to strangle her. The police had to be called, and Bannon was charged with domestic misdemeanour, battery and witness intimidation. The trial broke down, however, as Bacard did not appear in court. Bacard divorced him, and later revealed that Bannon and his lawyers had threatened to ruin her life if she pursued the charges against him. After the divorce, Bacard also had the terms of Bannon’s visitation rights to their children changed after she caught him hitting one of the 17 month old babies. She also said that he argued with her in front of them and that she did not feel safe.

It is not just his wife he has abused. He has also been charged with the coarse verbal abuse of female employees.

Martin also goes into Bannon’s opportunist support for Conservative and reactionary political movements, which he thought he could promote as vehicles for his own views, such as the Tea Party and then Sarah Palin, about whom he made a documentary. Curiously, this does not include an interview with Palin herself.

Bannon became friends with Andrew Breitbart, the news agency’s founder, because of their shared love of reactionary media. Breitbart even admiringly referred to Bannon as ‘the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party’, referring to the Nazi propagandist who directed Triumph of the Will, about the Nuremberg rally and an equally celebratory account of the Munich Olympics. Breitbart was a protégé of Matt Drudge, the creator of the Drudge Report, who converted the style and approach of Conservative talk radio, in which subjects were discussed in a manner unsuitable for television, to the internet. Drudge took other media stories, but manipulated their headlines and contents to fit its bias against the progressive Left, women, the working class and ethnic minorities. Along with Bannon, Drudge also picked up and promoted the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. She notes that while Jones is viewed as an internet ‘sideshow’, he has an audience of millions that hang on his every word. Bannon was brought into Breitbart to encourage outside investment into it. But the company was itself experiencing severe problems. These stems from it being blacklisted after it manipulated footage of a female government employee to make it appear that she was advocating violence against Whites. After Breitbart’s death, Bannon took over the leadership of that company too. He then set up the Government Accountability Institute, which issues spurious reports alleging government conspiracies. These include the allegation that protest movements are secretly funded by the government. Among the millionaires supporting Breitbart is Robert Mercer, the investment banker who ran anti-Muslim ads attacking the Ground Zero Mosque and advocating the death penalty, and who has one of the largest private collections of machine guns. Other donors included the billionaire Koch brothers. Martin notes how the Institute acted to allow these millionaires to launder money, which could be invested in Breitbart. The money donated to the IGA was then used to pay the wages of Breitbart employees, which is illegal.

Ex-employees have stated that Bannon has a tight, dictatorial control of the company and expects both journalists and guests to follow his editorial line. Among those, who have been published in his organisation are the anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller, Michael O’Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security advisor, and the bigot and paedophile enabler, Milo Yiannopolis. She shows how the site manipulates and aggregates news stories to attack Blacks and Muslims. Following the rise of massive anti-Muslim feeling in Europe, Breitbart has focused on promoting and playing on this fear. Breitbart’s audience is mainly angry White men, and the organisation’s audience figures shot up from 8 million to 18 million after the election of Donald Trump.

Martin discusses how Bannon has also attacked traditional Conservativism, stating that he wants to destroy the traditional Republican party as well as everything left of it. He is a populist, but only defends and promotes the White working class. He rejects ‘globalism’ in favour of economic nationalism. She states how this has been used by extreme right-wing regimes since Nazi Germany to divert attention away from capitalism as the cause of systemic economic crises. Bannon is happy to describe himself as an economic nationalist, but vigorously rejects the accusation that he is a White Nationalist, despite his attacks on non-White immigrants as a threat to Judeo-Christian civilisation, particularly Muslims. His views on Islamic immigration are even more extreme than Trump’s. If he was in charge of government, then not a single Muslim would be allowed into America. He has made documentaries showing American border towns as under siege from immigrants. Unlike Trump, he also does not want legal, well-educated and productive immigrants to stay in the country. There exists a tape, which shows him arguing against Trump on this point, when Trump protested about an Indian man, who was deported back to his homeland, where he set up a successful company employing thousands of people. Breitbart also runs stories portraying Black Americans as violent criminals and welfare scroungers. Bannon also claims that the Alt Right’s appeal to racism is entirely coincidental. He looks back to the 1950s as a golden age, whose stability and prosperity has been destroyed by the decline of Judeo-Christian civilisation. She notes that he does identify correctly some of the current problems, such as the increasing lack of upward mobility and the poverty caused by neoliberalism, and also points out that the 1950s were definitely not an era of prosperity for Black Americans and others, who were exploited and brutalised. In his view, the civil rights and other protest movements of 50s and 60s destroyed the working class and small businesses, and allowed big business and big government to collude against working Americans. She states that in his hatred of the civil rights and other movements, he attacks the very people, who have been hurt the most by globalisation. The video includes a clip from one of his wretched documentaries in which he criticises ‘White guilt’ for encouraging the belief that ‘everyone should have a house’. She then moves on to discuss another of his tawdry epics, in which he attacks the Occupy Wall Street movement. He tries to portray organic popular protest movements as vehicles for Communists, Democrats or George Soros, and attacks millennials for supposedly undermining American culture and values with the vapidity and materialism of popular culture. He even goes as far as to blame this for the rise of ISIS.

Martin makes the point that Bannon’s message was extremely effective during the 2016 election campaign, because it addressed issues that the Democrats did not want to confront. She credits Bannon with formulating the most extreme elements of Trump’s Muslim ban and his harsh hostility to the media, as well as showing how Trump’s proposal to publish a list of crimes committed by immigrants is also strongly similar to Breitbart’s strategy. She also points out that Bannon’s militarism may, as a Chinese army officer observed, make Bannon’s prediction that in five to ten years America and the Chinese will be at war a reality. Bannon has said several times that Islam and China are expanding because they believe the Judeo-Christian West is in retreat. And Trump has also appointed more generals to his cabinet than previous administrations.

Martin concludes the piece by stating that Bannon’s rise shows how corrupt and illegitimate the system is, and that the Democrats, who wish to fight the same wars and are in debt and the pockets of their own corporate donors, are unable to fight him. He can only be fought by a united, multicultural progressive movement on the streets.

This shows not just how vile the man’s supporters are, but it also reflects badly on their leader’s own appalling attitude to women. In this piece from The Young Turks, anchor Cenk Uygur talks about the genuinely hateful tweets Megyn Kelly’s received from Trump’s supporters. They’ve called her everything from ‘Bimbo’ to ‘bitch’, ‘slut’ and end with a word so foul I can’t repeat it here.

And all this is because she dared to ask Trump about his own disparaging comments about women. The Turks’ show this here, and although Trump tries to laugh it off, it is a reasonable question. Moreover, as the Turks themselves have repeatedly said, Kelly was actually on his side. When she asked the question, she follows it up with another question about how he would react to the Democrats using it against him. Which is a fair point.

But it’s too much for Trump, who can’t stand criticism, fair or otherwise, no matter how sugar-coated and sympathetic. And so there was the petulance and foot-stamping of his refusal to appear on the Fox News debate, because it was to be moderated by Kelly, and then the sheer venom of his supporters.

There are a number of different aspects to this. The first is the misogynist hatred that comes out of certain corners of the Web, designed to silence women. Mary Beard, the classical historian, was subjected to all kinds of misogynist abuse after her comments denying that immigrants were flooding and destroying various towns in the north of England. In response she made a programme on BBC 2, Shut Up, Dear, about the attempts to silence women’s voices down the centuries.

And it’s not just women, who suffer horrendous abuse at the hands of anonymous posters on the Net. Quentin Letts, the parliamentary sketch writer for the Daily Mail, includes ‘Webonymous’, in his book, 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain. The anonymous tweeters and emailers of the Net are included, because there’s a level of vitriol and abuse in their messages which goes far beyond even those written by the cranks in green ink. No matter how insulting and poisonous they get, wrote Letts, they will at least end their missive with ‘Yours faithfully, X’. No such grace comes from the keyboards of the angry hordes on the Web.

And the Republican Party in particular has a problem with strong women, despite the fact that it’s produced some of the strongest and most powerful. It is the party of traditional masculine values, where men are rugged and tough, and women dutifully subordinate to their husbands. And some of the men in the Republican party are really intimidated by strong, independent women. Remember back in the 1990s when one Republican Party delegate, who I believe was a deranged pastor of some kind, said of Hillary Clinton that she was ‘the kind of woman who leaves her husband, turns to lesbianism, practices witchcraft and sacrifices her children’.

What?

From what I’ve seen of her, she seems just a dull, corporate politico. She’s undoubtedly efficient and highly intelligent, but she always struck me as being very measured in what she says. She’s very definitely not a crazed mouth on legs seething with hate and bile like Ann Coulter, and definitely not as outspokenly airheaded as Sarah Palin, all superpatriotism and booster clichés. I sincerely doubt that she’s got a Satanic temple in her basement, or is part of Wiccan coven in Salem or anywhere else. And the last time I looked, Chelsea was very much alive and well.

Joe Queenan back in the 1990s in his Radio 4 show, Postcard from Gotham, opined that most of the abuse Hillary Clinton got for being a tough, successful woman, came from men, who married to women like her. And since then, the attitude to women and women’s rights appears to have hardened, just as it has against Blacks and the disadvantaged generally. The Republican party have deliberately targeted ‘angry White men’, guys, who feel threatened by the social changes around them, which have seen them and their position in society come under competition from women, Blacks and other, traditionally marginalised groups. Hence the hostility to affirmative action programmes, the rising xenophobia, and the raving antifeminism coming from the Republicans and their supporters. And Trump reflects this poisonous mix of prejudices. He’s supposed to be a grade-A, super Alpha Male, ready to put women, Mexicans and Muslims in their place, for a better, traditional America of pure Republican Party values. And the result is a wave of pure hate from his supporters. Whatever they’re real socio-economic group and their place in the social hierarchy, they increasingly sound like angry trailer trash, ranting about the threat to society from Cultural Marxism, Hispanics, Blacks and Arabs. Sitting in soiled vests in dingy bars, sullenly nursing their pints and reminiscing about the good old days before all this political correctness and the girlie men now in charge, before staggering home to an evening of domestic violence.

Trump shares the same atavistic instincts of this crowd, but with all the smarm and polish of a slick politico and reality TV personality. He may wear a suit, but his followers see in him the same hatreds they have. And when he lets loose against a woman, they follow suit, with the same lack of restraint and all the poison, bile and spite the web can muster. We need statesmen, not ranting demagogues whipping up hate. And that’s why Trump should not be let anywhere near the White House.